‘Mad Men’ Recap: In Season Finale, A Whole New Kind of Cliché

During last week’s episode of “Mad Men” the camera delivered a wonderful shot of Don, Faye and Megan in the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce standing far apart from one another in a perfectly composed triangle. On Sunday night during the season finale, one side of that triangle was eliminated as Don axed the mature, reflective Dr. Miller in favor of his beautiful, young secretary.

Before we unpack what this all says about the fate of women in 1965 – and the show said a lot of it for us, perhaps too explicitly – let us take a moment to absorb the impulsiveness of Don’s decision. Needing childcare for his trip to California, in the wake of Betty’s abrupt firing of Carla for displaying characteristic sanity, Don gets Megan to join him on the West Coast to watch after Sally, Bobby and Gene. As we will recall, Megan had already shown Don, and us, what a wonderful mother she’d make when Sally ran away to Don’s office and fell down.

On the trip to California, Megan shows herself to be the kind of nanny mothers kill people on the playground for: She swims with the children, sings to them in French and acts without anger or retaliation when the inevitable messes occur. I think the moment when Sally spilled her milkshake at lunch and Megan just blithely cleaned up was crucial. Don, ready to blow a gasket himself and so programmed to the terror that Betty would inflict in such a situation, is pleasingly shocked to see Megan react with calm nonchalance: Kids will be kids. This is an approach to the world he is definitely not used to.

An hour after viewing and mulling this over, though, I still can’t come to a resolution over whether Don’s decision to make Megan the next Mrs. Draper is reasonable or insane. Part of the impetus would seem to have come from the sheer materializing of the ring that Anna left Don: He must have understood this to mean that she hoped he’d re-marry. Don is clearly moved by Megan’s kindness and ease with the children during the trip. He tells her that he feels around her the way he always wanted to feel. (Serene? Youthful? Unburdened by his duplicities?) Also, any indications that Megan slept with Don originally out of cold careerism seem to have evaporated. And yet, she doesn’t know the single most significant thing about Don, as Faye does. And we could argue that it wasn’t merely the Megan positives that drew Don to her but the perceived Faye negatives as well.

In her pre-dawn good bye, at the beginning of the hour, Faye sweetly tells Don that he must stop sticking his head in the sand and deal with the past. Clearly this was a turn-off. At base there is something about the decision that has the whiff of desperation Don evinced during the first season when he tried to get Rachel Menken to run away with him. Again, he wanted a quick fix and he wanted to escape his Dick Whitman-ness. It also seemed telling and weighted beyond the incident at hand, that Henry in yelling at Betty about Carla’s dismissal warned: “There are no fresh starts.”

There are only empty re-starts, especially for affluent, middle-aged men who take up with attractive young women as their effort at an Act II, we now know. Henry himself has learned this lesson the hard way (how soon will he be headed back to Reno?) and so too has Roger for whom the thrill of the new has already run dry. As Joan brilliantly said of Don, during her very long distance call to her husband – I’m paraphrasing – “he thinks he is the first guy to marry his 25-year-old secretary.” The moment of Don’s engagement announcement at the office was truly delicious for Don’s obliviousness to the fact that he’d become a whole new kind of cliché. Additionally, he steals the thunder from Ken and Peggy who have rather serendipitously landed a $250,000 pantyhose account.

But how much did we love the Joan and Peggy encounter generated by it all? It was great not only for the girl talk it produced and the rapprochement it signaled between the two women but because it punctuated the extent to which they are soul sisters in a sense: each has had her ambitions and gone about them in different ways; each has been shafted by the big bad patriarchy; each has had a pregnancy resulting from an illicit office romance. Let’s make it official: All of us who believed that Joan did not go through with her abortion can now feel smug for having been absolutely right. She will have a little one in a world, “Mad Men” seems to be telling us, where what men really want is a woman who can mommy.

OK, final talking points for what I thought overall was a strong season finale:

So Ken is above exploiting family connections. He has morals, lines, and boundaries.

Or does he? Meaning: Were we meant to see a foreshadowing of an eventual Ken and Peggy coupling? (“What, are you two getting married?”)

Don pitches the Cancer Society, saying he thinks that anti-smoking ads that prey on teenagers’ fears of mortality will succeed. But do teenagers ever really think about mortality? Not really; but Don does.

Which begs the question: How much of Megan’s attractiveness to him just stems from the fact that she is 25?